Wednesday, September 06, 2017

WaPo | The end of summer is an exciting time for millions of
children, parents, teachers and administrators who embark on a new
academic year. And yet the turbulent debates about race, civil rights,
immigration, science and American identity — which have played out
violently from the streets of Charlottesville to the corridors of the
West Wing and across the country — will continue to rile American
schools.

Just last year, a Morton, Ill. school board member protested the purchase of a science textbook that favored an "Old Earth" origin story. Conservative parents in suburban Chicago opposed a day-long seminar intended to foster discussion about the persistence of racial division in American life. And a Republican lawmaker in Arkansas proposed a ban
on teaching the late Howard Zinn's popular left-leaning interpretation
of American history, "A People's History of the United States," in
public classrooms.

These curriculum controversies
are not new. At their core is a debate over power and hierarchy in
American society. Those individuals and viewpoints that are valued in
school curriculums have a decided advantage when it comes to making
claims of moral authority. If American children, for example, grow up
learning that evolutionary biology is the key to understanding human
origins, creationist Americans will have a much more difficult time
getting a hearing for their views and will thus lack moral authority in
the important realm of science. Yet while curriculum battles shape and
are shaped by the nation's larger cultural wars, they also threaten to
undermine a pillar of American democracy that should concern both sides:
public education.

Early challenges to public
schools came from economic and religious concerns. The Protestant elite
who set up the common school system in the 19th century believed schools
provided training and acculturation for the poor and working class. The
working class decried the invasiveness of compulsory education, and in
manufacturing towns like Beverly, Mass., voted to discontinue the high
school in 1860. Catholics also saw schools as an attempt to indoctrinate
children with Protestant beliefs. They began to build their own network
of parochial schools — building institutions to challenge the cultural
authority of Protestantism.